There are those on both sides of the political debate (and some who fancy themselves in the middle) who use anecdotes, scary stories, hyperbole and highly elastic versions of ‘true’ stories to support their solutions to our present health care insurance disaster.
While both sides are guilty, I’d have to say the free marketers look to be ‘guiltier’. Case in point – I’m on the distribution list (at least at the time of this writing) for a few PR firms that have been hired by conservative types to get bloggers to espouse the libertarian, it-ain’t-broke-that-bad-so-don’t-fix-it perspective on health care reform. And they tend to try to scare the crap out of everyone with horror stories of waiting lists in Canada, patients expiring in the UK on transplant lists, and folks with furrin accents invading American hospitals as they try to get kidneys or MRIs or gall bladder surgery without waiting till three years after they’re dead. And these are the reputable folks – there’s also a lot of misinformation circulating in the webosphere about bad Canadian health care.
Not to say this doesn’t happen – there’s no perfect health care delivery/reimbursement system anywhere on earth (although the VA looked closer than most before it was underfunded).
Are there waiting lists in Canada? Yep – but they’re not intolerably long. Are there waiting lists in the US? Yep. Which one is shorter? Depends. Do you have insurance? If you aren’t insured and live in the US, the wait is really really long. If you are a workers comp patient in Massachusetts and need a neurosurgeon, the wait is really really long (the fee schedule is so low very few docs will take WC patients).
And let us not forget that American health care system has a pretty poor reputation for delivering consistently good care…
Ignoring the politically-biased reports on waiting lists, it is likely that Americans don’t have to wait as long as Canadians for some specialty care, and some Canadians may actually not get certain services. For that rapid access, Americans pay almomst twice as much.
You can get it cheap, fast, or good – pick one. We Americans have picked fast, ignored good, and certainly ignored cheap. The Canadians picked cheap, are at least as good, and have accepted slow.
Before you vote, consider what you could do with $750 billion a year in the US – because that’s how much we’d save if our costs mirrored our friends to the north.
Aug
4
We are not going to be a Canidian system, because we are not Cadinian, but more importantly, healthcare inthe US is nto about healthcare, it is a jobs program. Outside of hotels, hospitals are the largest employers of unskilled labor, and to deliver healthcare efficiently would close hospitals, and with the debt they carry, they would make the mortage crisis look like a picnick
Actually, “R”, the difference in job numbers is not in health-care services. Canada’s health system actually offers more hands-on care in its hospitals and nursing homes than the U.S. system by my observation (although I haven’t got data handy). The difference? It’s in the jobs in the money-wasting part of the health system: the people whose job is to fight to get bills paid and those who fight not to pay them. The bureaucracy in the US private sector health system puts a government-sponsored system to shame.
A few points:
1. According to the American Congressional Research Bureau, Canadians outlive Americans by two years;
2. I recommend my recent series comparing American health care with that in the other 29 democracies within the OECD at workerscompinsider.com;
3. In research, the plural of anecdote is “data.”